In the present scrimmage of ghastliness, mere civility gets trampled underfoot.
Instead, let us speak of forbearance.
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It’s an old word, a good word, the kind of word you might see in a Jane Austen novel.
I don’t recall its ever being spoken in my growing up. Mother never sat me on her knee and said, “Now, Son, remember to forbear.”
My New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary claims that many of the word’s meanings are “Now rare” or “Now chiefly Sc[ottish].” I put it to you, Gentle Reader: If “forbear” is being shipped off, bit by bit, to Scotland, how much longer can it last?
It would be a crying shame to lose the word “forbearance”; if we lose the word, we shall nearly have lost the thing itself.
Forbearance has nothing to do with any of those bears who went before us (“My forebears came over on the Mayflower”). It has much to do with our bearing—with what we bear and how we bear ourselves.
Better to be forbearing than overbearing.
Kindness, care, tact, decency, empathy, compassion are rough synonyms—but forbearance beats them all. Why? Because it includes instructions for its use. You can unpack it to mean: Back off a little. Restrain yourself. Cease bearing down with all your might.
To bear is to carry or hold something, perhaps a weight, as in “I don’t know how I can bear this.” But it can also mean to press, to be the weight, as in “Bear down hard on it.”
The for- at the beginning of “forbear” does not mean “fore,” nor does it mean “for.” Rather, it is a prefix of its own that means “against, out of, away from” or “abstain, neglect, renounce,” as in forgo, forgive, forget, forsake, forswear.
To forbear is to abstain from pressing. It is to relent, to have patience, to wait and see. It is the opposite of maximum pressure; it is the relief valve in society.
True, some definitions of the verb have become rare—or even Scottish—but it gives us a very useful noun, “forbearance.”
1 Abstinence from enforcing what is due, esp. the payment of a debt 2 The action or habit of forbearing; an instance of this 3 Forbearing conduct or spirit; patient endurance, lenity
Forbearance automatically includes a regard for the needs and interests of others. To hold yourself back is to give them space.
Forbearance is the willingness to go a little easier, to have patience with others. Not to make a federal case out of everything.
Life is too short.
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Forbearance seems the opposite of politics. I don’t mean garden-variety, small-town politics, in which forbearance may still play a useful part.
But I’m thinking of big-name, national, every-night-on-TV politicians. And, even more, their acolytes—poor, lost souls who have allowed politics to become their religion. They talk of nothing else, they think of nothing else. It is all-consuming.
You may know a few such people. They never let up, never relent. They bear down, then bear down more. They press each point to its unimaginable limit. They honor no boundaries. If you disagree, or even if you do agree but without enough totality, you are past all hope of redemption.
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Yes, O New Favorite Writer—granted, their conduct is despicable.But we must do the same, don’t you see, or they will win! If I show forbearance, they will use that weakness, ride roughshod over my concerns, and win by the simple force of their absolutism.
Now, Dear Reader, in case you have been wondering for years whether I would ever say anything truly subversive, listen up:
Please try forbearance.
Let them have their precious triumph; it will turn to dust and ashes in their mouths.
Those who forbear, on the other hand, will gain something of far greater worth.
Gain? Gain what, precisely?
They gain self-respect as well as the respect of others.
They gain the infinite satisfaction of sponsoring calm. They become wholesome exemplars of sanity for our world.
Those who make a habit of forbearance, and all who come within their orbits, gain a larger perspective: a glimpse of the fat upland where those things dwell that are more important than politics.
They win the argument by moving beyond it. They rest on eternals, while others remain mired in temporalities.
These are the fruits that come from reclaiming the happy ground of forbearance.
I’m looking forward to an inspiring weekend, a time of meeting new friends and learning new things, at the Faith Forward Writers Retreat near Sparta, Wisconsin. I’ll be a panelist in the open-to-the-public “Meet the Authors” event Thursday night.
It’s billed as a retreat for “Christian-faith based writers.” It makes me wonder, this Easter week: What qualifies me to speak at a Christian writers’ conference? Am I a Christian writer?
I am Christian; I am a writer. Therefore, I’m a Christian writer. But the term calls up an image of one who writes “Christian books”—Bible explorations, for example. Or inspiring essays. Or Christian romance, meaning romance novels in which the heroine’s Christian faith plays a pivotal role in the development and outcome of the plot. Some of my good writer friends, like Barbara M. Britton and Deb Wenzler Farris, write with excellence in some of these genres.
My books feature fictional characters—Anders, Maria, Daniel, Izzy—who live in a Christian world and whose faith is conventional, largely unexamined. Faith plays a role in forming their personalities, and it influences their actions, but it’s seldom at the front of their minds.
The Christianity in my books is like an iceberg, or like an old tree trunk that has floated in a lake or river long enough to become waterlogged. Only a bit may appear above the surface, but mariners: ignore it at your peril.
Since I’ll be billed in a public event as a Christian writer, this is a good time to inform you about the particular Christian faith that undergirds my doings, writing included. Though Your New Favorite Writer’s books are neither Bible commentaries nor theological treatises, Dear Reader, you may wish to learn the spiritual identity of their author.
Who knows? It might be catching, and you deserve fair warning.
So here it is.
Credo
I believe there is a God, and I know it’s not me.
I think we are all creatures of a Great Intelligence far beyond our imaginations, exempt from our own limits of history and finitude.
I believe in Science; I believe God is its Author. The greatest scientists—the Keplers and Newtons and Einsteins and Hawkings—are its imperfect annotators.
Whether or not I know God is not as momentous as the fact that God knows me.
It is wondrous that, despite my imperfections, despite my dual nature as saint and sinner, God loves me wholly, forgives my transgressions, and showers blessings on me daily. God seems to ignore my just desserts. That is why God is called Love.
Photo of a painting of Jesus healing the paralytic from the wall of the baptistery in the Dura-Europa church circa 232 A.D. It is one of the earliest visual depictions of Jesus. It was excavated by the Yale-French Excavations between 1928-37 in present day Syria and now resides in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT. Public Domain.
Jesus Christ is the avatar of that Love.
As a Christian, I ought to be wholly on Christ’s team. But in our complex world, it’s often unclear to me whether I am batting for Jesus or the Other Guy.
I have come to rely on God’s forgiveness, because I so often need it.
A Few Corollaries
The Bible says God commanded us to “go and make disciples of all nations.” I am choosing to use the method of drawing them to Christ through the attractiveness of my example. I know this seems a forlorn hope, but it’s what I’ve got.
How can I convert you? I have a hard enough job converting myself.
Maybe that’s only my recessive personality speaking. For example, I also don’t wish to baptize you into my political views or my sports team. In fact, I’ve never hankered to run your life. You need to figure things out for yourself.
Yet, if I have the salvation power of Jesus Christ, and if that is the Greatest Gift in the World, should I not want to share it with everyone I meet?
Well, of course I should. But I’m a writer, not a miracle worker.
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
Paul the Apostle.
I’m still working on the love part. Once I master that, we can talk about the rest.
Amen.
P.S.—You may still be able to attend the Faith Forward Writers Retreat. The sign-up is here.
Bronze bust of John Donne, photographed by Matthew Black. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0
No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were . . . .
John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation 17
When you reach a certain age, you notice how many friends you have lost.
“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.”
When someone I know dies, I take it personally. There goes a friend.
It could have been me.
A few weeks ago, Linda Grover Stehura died. Next Saturday I will attend her memorial service. Linda was a cherished friend of long standing. She was kind and intelligent, with a gentle humor.
Linda and friend
Her obituary says: “In June 1967, she graduated cum laude as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society from Knox College in Galesburg, IL, where she majored in English Education. Linda continued her education at UW-Madison earning her Master’s degree in English in 1970. While in Madison, she met her husband, Thomas J. Stehura, and they married in 1971.” (My italics.)
Joelle and I introduced Linda to Tom. Their wedding was held on our lawn, under a huge willow’s canopy, when we lived on Major Avenue on the East Side. We were friends ever since. Linda succumbed swiftly to pancreatic cancer at the tender age of 79.
Charles
Just days ago, AyukEnow Beatrice Diffang announced “the passing into glory of Rev. Charles Sagay, founder and president of Mission of Hope and Mission School of Hope, on January 21st, 2025.” Charles was a big man—quiet, warm, friendly. He, through the institution he founded in a poor corner of Cameroun, schooled hundreds of tribal children who would otherwise have had no education. More than that, he actually brought them into official existence by trooping them to the county seat to get birth certificates, so their government could no longer ignore their existence.
Charles made many trips to the United States—to raise funds for his important mission, yes, but more than that: to be in fellowship with others who shared his hope for the future of the human race. One time he stayed at our house and got the deluxe tour of Madison, Wisconsin. His humility and grace were lessons for us all. The human race can hardly bear to lose such people.
Krafty
My friend and fellow writer John Kraft passed into eternity a few years back—I don’t recall exactly when. I do know we were in a hotel somewhere on one of our travels, possibly in Ketchikan, when his wife, Dawn Curlee Carlson, announced his death via Facebook. It had been sudden, unexpected. He simply died.
Dawn, and the rest of us, lost a glowing light that day. Self-effacing, John was—except that nobody so blessed with sharp wit and a sardonic take on everyday things could ever fade into the shadows. It was a privilege to know him. Yet another good friend gone too soon.
Tim
Almost eight years ago, Tim Donovan died from a wholly unexpected cerebrovascular event. Tim was a newscaster, television personality, military officer, and public affairs professional. An intelligent, challenging, and complex personality.
I worked under his sometimes exasperating direction in the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs. It took some years to get know Tim, but by the time of his death, he was a friend. He and I had been through a lot together. Tim was only 65.
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Perhaps you will think me cold, Dear Reader, but when I think of Linda or Charles or John or Tim—or many other friends, relatives, and acquaintances lost over the past years—when I think of their swift passing, I am driven back upon the rock of survival. My survival.
They are dead; I am not. Through no special merit, I have endured this long on the face of the earth and still hope to last a while longer.
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When one has been retired for some time, the question of relevance rears its unlovely head.
“Isn’t it true, Mister Wise Guy”—I hear some Celestial Prosecutor say—“isn’t it true that you have spent the past fifteen years living on accumulated wealth . . . unemployed . . . at leisure . . . doing whatever you please, which in your case amounts to writing down the meandering contents of your head and publishing them wherever and whenever you can, broadcasting them to all and sundry, whether anyone is interested or not?
“Is that not so, Mister Wise Guy?
“Can you mention any recent year in which you have made a tangible contribution to the good of humanity?”
You have caught me, Your Honor, just as I am, without one plea.
But here is what is left out of that telling indictment:
The trivial routines of each day—I scale them like a desperate mountaineer.
When I ponder the value of any one of the pursuits in which I spend my being, the only thing that comes to mind is: Well . . . it’s better than being dead.
When I rise in the dark of a November morning, after the dog jumps off my bed, when I have found and sorted the tangled sheets, plumped the pillows, and smoothed the covers still soaked in smells of sleep—what can I say about all this bed-making?
It is an activity preferable to being dead.
When I pull my twin-bladed razor through the slop of lather, careful to shave close but not too close, swabbing off the lingering soap-trails with a hot rag, towelling my new-shorn face, and slapping on the sting of aftershave—what can it be but another activity which, whatever else you may say of it, is preferable to being dead?
Someone named Jim Harrison was quoted in a Facebook meme, to wit: “The difference between poetry and you is you look in the mirror and say, ‘I am getting old,’ but Shakespeare looks in the mirror and says, ‘Devouring Time, blunt thou thy lion’s paws.’”
Of course that’s true.
We know now—thanks to post-Modern physics—that time itself has no existence apart from matter/energy. We only pass through time by living it—by doing things. If we did not do things—if we did not have extension and heat and motion—time would be quite beside the point.
As a Christian, I know that my Redeemer lives. And I trust I shall meet my Redeemer in some unimaginable plane of being, in form I know not what, in circumstance I know not how.
That phrase, incidentally, was not first murmured by a Christian. The locus classicus of “I know my Redeemer lives” is the Book of Job, which we may regard as a work of rhetorical fiction penned centuries before the coming of Jesus and preserved in the Jewish Scriptures. In the book’s 19th chapter, verses 25through 27, Job—an upright man bewilderingly visited by a series of harrowing misfortunes—replies to a scolding by his friend Bildad the Shuhite, saying, in part,
“But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will stand upon the earth at last. And after my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God! I will see him for myself. Yes, I will see him with my own eyes. I am overwhelmed at the thought!” New Living Translation
Gentle Reader, I don’t know how to plumb the wisdom of Job. You may say rightly that I have really no excuse for even thinking about such matters, let alone sharing my thoughts with the world.
And yet . . . and yet, it is better than being dead. It is something I can do that Linda and Charles and John and Tim no longer can. So I will do it for them.
Finally, it’s here. I refer not to the Trump second term, however you may feel about that.
No, I’m talking about something of epochal importance: The re-publication of my historical novel, Price of Passage, in a new edition, re-titled The Price of Passage.
The re-emergence of this monumental work, its light hidden under a bushel by the collapse of its original publisher, has been a rocky road indeed.
Some rocks still lie in the path ahead.
How It All Began
I had a gripping Civil War story, which had taken most of five years to write. Its title was Freedom’s Purchase. I did not really like that title, but it was the best I could come up with.
After a lot of folderol, I found a traditional publisher, Dan Willis of DX Varos Publishing, who was willing to take a chance on it. While bringing it to publication, we hit upon a new, improved title: Price of Passage: A Tale of Immigration and Liberation. The title and subtitle echoed themes and plots in my book, which is about Norwegian immigrants and fugitive slaves.
We released Price of Passage on August 23, 2022, with a fabulous launch party at Mystery to Me Bookstore in Madison. Then I began making the rounds of libraries, bookstores, book festivals, and craft shows to sell and sign copies, in person, with real book-buying customers.
Meanwhile, I was working on my next book, a coming-of-age story called Izzy Strikes Gold!
And Then What Happened?
Besides direct sales at public events, we were selling Price of Passage on the internet through Amazon or the publisher’s own website. These sales generated royalty payments, which the publisher owed me on a quarterly basis. But in July 2023, less than a year after the book was published, the royalties ceased.
The publisher, Dan Willis, had died.
This was terrible news: First, because Dan had been a straight shooter in his dealings and a valued partner to me and other authors; second, because it turned out that nobody was up to the job of taking his place, and the DX Varos publishing company soon stopped functioning as a normal publishing company.
Not to bore you with sordid details, Gentle Reader, but Your New Favorite Writer barely managed to get his rights back. It was a close call.
So now it was back to Square One. I was the sole owner of a great literary property but needed a publishing partner to put it back into the market. I was up a creek with no means to propel my craft.
Kira to the Rescue
The hero of this story is Kira Henschel. Kira, who owns and operates HenschelHAUS Publishing of Milwaukee, heard about my plight from a guardian angel, Christine DeSmet. Kira met me over coffee and agreed on the spot to re-publish Price of Passage and also to publish the next book, Izzy Strikes Gold!
Because of logistics, Izzy came out first, in July 2024, from Kira’s Three Towers Press imprint, and it has been well received. Now, Price of Passage is being re-published, also by Three Towers. The release date is next Saturday, February 1. The book is already up on Amazon, where you can lodge a pre-order.
Huzzah! Huzzah!
It’s Always Something
If it isn’t one thing, Fair Reader, it’s another.
The book has a wonderful new cover, designed by Rony Dhar. It also has a slightly new title: The Price of Passage: From Norway to America, From Slavery to Freedom. It’s close to the old title—which would be wonderful if we were pitching horseshoes.
Only we’re not pitching horseshoes, we’re pitching a book. Because the title of the new edition is slightly different from the original title, Amazon won’t carry the book’s 28 positive customer reviews over to the buying page for the new edition. This is a major hindrance, since Amazon customer reviews in the listing greatly influence the buying decisions of new customers.
We need to get new reviews for The Price of Passage, even though the entire content is exactly the same book that already garnered 28 good reviews.
“How Can I Help?”
This one’s kaput.
If you’ve never read the book, Dear Reader, you don’t know what you’ve missed. And now it’s back on the market. Buy it; read it; and when you like it, post a positive review. It’s simple. Just go to The Price of Passage: From Norway to America, From Slavery to Freedom. Scroll way down the listing to where it says, on the left, “Write a Customer Review.” Click on that button and follow Amazon’s instructions.
You don’t have to write a book report. Just a sentence or two about why you liked it will suffice.
Read this one instead.
If you’re one of those who have already read Price of Passage but have not yet left a review, please do so. You can honestly review it at the page shown above for the new edition, even though what you read was the old edition—because the books are the same, word for word. Only the title and cover have changed. But please do leave a review. You’ll be helping a lot.
Finally, if you already did read the book and already did leave a review, please go to the page shown above and leave a review again under the new edition. It can be a brand new review, or you can use the same words you did before. If you don’t remember what you wrote before, email me at larryfsommers@gmail.com, and I’ll send you the text of your previous review.
By the way: Reviews may be posted on or after February 1, 2025—a week from Saturday—but not before then.
The literary world embraces your willing, cooperative spirit. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart, you wonderful person.
It always seems perfectly clear to me what we’re doing here. But it may have been a while since I spelled it out in plain English, so I can’t blame you if you’re confused.
My friend Dan Blank advises writers to make sure we have our Key Messages honed. I think he means there ought to be some central tendency to what we write—that with which we ultimately are most concerned.
You may have noticed that this blog is titled “Reflections.” By this I mean these essays are not mere recitations of fact. Whatever the content may be, I have thought about it, at least a little bit, and now present to you my particular perspective on it. So these are truly reflections of my thought processes.
You may have noticed this blog is subtitled “Seeking fresh meanings from our common past.” By that I mean to suggest that I want to find out what we can learn from our history that may give us fresh outlooks in our present lives.
Everything grows out of something, Dear Reader. Nothing comes from nothing. To know where we have been, I submit, is to know our culture; and to know our culture is to know something big about ourselves.
When I first set up this website, almost six years ago, I tried to summarize these Key Messages, and the mission—if you will—of this blog by setting up a separate page titled “History—Who Cares?”
Recently I revised that little self-revelatory essay, deleted the special page it was on, and transferred it to the tab marked “Author,” which you can find at the head of this page. You could click on over there to read it, but just for this week I will save you the trouble and post the same essay below:
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The Past? Who Cares?
I care, that’s who.
My name is Larry F. Sommers.
The Sanburn cabin.
My people are from Knoxville, a small town in Illinois. Two of my uncles died flying bombers to defeat the Axis Powers in the 1940s.
When my Grandma’s house was torn down in 1963, workers found under the siding boards a square-hewn timber cabin built by storekeeper John G. Sanburn in 1832. This cabin was restored to its frontier appearance and can be seen today on the Public Square in Knoxville.
The Streator Public Library
I lived in Streator, Illinois, birthplace of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the planet Pluto . . . and of author Clarence Mulford, who created the cowboy character Hopalong Cassidy. As a boy I haunted the Streator Public Library—a lovely classical building donated by Andrew Carnegie—where I read science fiction by Lester Del Rey, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.
I was twelve in 1957 when Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, was launched. I mourned because the Russians had done what Americans were supposed to do.
Hamilton
I attended high school in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Our history teacher, Leo Gebhardt, was on a first-name basis with the Founding Fathers: “. . . and just then,” he would say, “when our new country needed its credit stabilized, who should come along? Your friend and mine . . . Alexander Hamilton.”
I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the Vietnam War. I have seen how such events can live on as skywritten myths, having a shaky attachment to facts.
In middle age, I became a Christian, coming into line with a 2,000-year tradition of saints, sinners, scholars, artists, musicians, and freedom fighters.
Our lives—ALL our lives—are part of history, and history is a part of our lives. That’s why I write.
T.S. Eliot wrote:
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
I want to go where we’ve been before, yet see it with fresh eyes. Why not come along?
Ebenezer Scrooge in mortal apprehension, portrayed by George C. Scott. Fair use.
Why do we tingle when sleigh bells jingle? Why do we light up with joy when we see a tree lit up with colored bulbs? Why do we smile when Santa says, “Rudolph with your nose so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”
Why do we cringe when old Scrooge says “Bah! Humbug!”, and why do our eyes water when a new Scrooge brings a turkey to the Cratchitts?
Natalie Wood pulls Edmund Gwynn’s beard. Fair use.
What makes us tune in yet again to see Kris Kringle put on a Santa suit and treat Macy’s shoppers like real people?
Why do we hold our breath when Judy Garland sings to her kid sister, Margaret O’Brien, hoping against hope that her little Christmas will be merry after all?
What is it in us that appreciates apprentice angel Clarence’s appreciation of George Bailey’s character, even when George himself can’t see it?
Clarence and George. Public Domain.
Why do writers of books, movies, and songs always come back to Christmas? The Old Reliable. The fountain of innumerable waterworks.
Is Christmas, then, the last refuge of a scoundrel? Is it just a humbug—or is there some redeeming merit in it, after all?
Yes, Virginia
I think we love Christmas because we were made for a better life—a life we have lost sight of—and Christmas helps us see it again.
Adoration of the Shepherds. Dutch, Mathias Stomer, ca. 1650. Public Domain.
Christmas is when we commemorate God’s act of bringing love to the world, fixing up the broken toys we have made of our lives so they can work the way they were meant to.
This was such a big thought in the days of the Roman Empire that it took over a whole continent, resonating through two thousand years, echoing still today in our music, our drama, our popular entertainments—and in our humbler gatherings around the family fireside.
We know life can be better, and it doesn’t hurt once a year to be reminded of it, in powerful ways. In ways that resonate with our culture and our past experiences.
So by all means let’s enjoy our Tom-and-Jerrys, roast our chestnuts on an open fire, and shake our collective fingers at the Grinch.
But let’s never forget that a better life can be ours the other 364 days as well. That however gloomy things may seem at the moment, however much Despair may seem to reign over our affairs, there is a Greater Power at work behind the scenes.
It’s a Wonderful Life. Public Domain.
Call it what you will. I call it God. I call it Love. And I trust it will prevail.
There really are miracles, even on 34th Street. Someday soon we all will be together. It really is a wonderful life.
A church can be the voice of God in our bewildered lives.
Movie poster. Fair use.
In 1950, when Your New Favorite Writer was only five years old, along came The Next Voice You Hear, a film in which God breaks into radio broadcasts, leading people to re-examine their lives.
Its title came from a standard radio-era trope: A staff announcer’s preparation of the audience for an important message by saying, “The next voice you hear will be . . . .”
In this case, the movie implied, the next voice heard will be God, with a message for the world.
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The Christian church has always struggled to embody the voice of God for people on Earth.
In the High Middle Ages, people seemed to accept the notion that what the Holy Roman Catholic Church said, through priests and prelates, was God’s voice. If a pope said, “Go to Jerusalem and conquer it for Christianity,” that’s what people did. It was the voice of God.
Before long, people began to question that equation—mostly because, in the Reformation, “the Church” became two churches, then three. Then a thousand.
With a thousand churches saying different things, how could they all be the voice of God?
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Today, we have a different problem. Church membership, attendance, and affiliation by any metric you may choose, have all declined—inexorably, year by year, decade over decade.
In today’s society, it is inevitable that people will say, “Can any church speak for God?”
I am here to affirm, Dear Reader, that it can. See my statement above: “A church can be the voice of God in our bewildered lives.”
I’m not talking about doctrine. It was once common to suppose that a church could be exactly right—fully orthodox—in its theology. In which case, of course, it spoke with the voice of God.
Few people buy into that kind of thinking anymore.
Today, Christians are more likely to hew to an old biblical standard: “Ye shall know them by their fruits,” words spoken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
Permit me to amplify.
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The church where I worship may serve as an example: Heritage Congregational Church of Madison, Wisconsin.
Heritage was founded by a group of high-minded civic Christians in 1968. At that time approximately half of all Americans attended church, normally wearing their Sunday best. It was the classic 1950s church. Heritage had about three hundred members soon after it opened its doors.
Almost immediately, erosion began. Over five and a half decades, our membership dwindled until we are now down to 51 members, theoretically. That translates to an active core group of about two dozen who show up regularly for Sunday morning services and other church events.
Most of us are old. We have three “young” families—mom and dad in their early fifties plus children in their late teens or early twenties. The rest of us are in our seventies and eighties.
We are not getting any younger. By most reckonings, we ought to be what one old-time member used to call “tired roosters.”
Surprise: We are not.
I do not mean we never get tired. We do.
I do not mean we are whirling dervishes of liturgical and evangelical activism. We are not.
We are calm. We are patient. We are methodical.
We are full of faith, hope, and love.
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We were not always that way. We got to be that way. God made us that way.
Five years ago, we were a dying church.
We struggled to maintain a huge building far in excess of our needs for worship or any other purpose. Just to keep snow and ice from demolishing the roof was a serious drain on our energies. We always worried about money, mostly money to keep the building going.
Then covid hit. We couldn’t even use this enormous building to gather on a Sunday morning and worship the Lord. We worshiped by Zoom while the building sat empty. That in itself was some kind of revelation, to use a biblical term.
We offered the building for sale. To our amazement, it was snapped up quickly by another congregation at a very fair price.
Suddenly—SHAZAM!—we were awash in cash. We had no money worries for the first time in anyone’s memory.
But now we had a different problem. Covid was over. Masks were becoming optional, then rare. Life was back to normal, sort of. And we had no place to meet in person. We deeply yearned to meet again with our loved brothers and sisters face-to-face.
We rented a storefront in the conveniently-named Heritage Square strip mall. We chose the location because it was central and available. The echo of our church name was just a stroke of good fortune.
Our storefront worship space.
We thought the storefront would be a temporary location. But you know, we like our new space. We’re in no hurry to move on. For the next few years at least, we can afford the rent.
Free of the institutional concerns that used to tie us in knots, we have begun to relax.
We concentrate now on simply holding good, restorative worship services in our new space. Our music director, Robert Eversman, has even built a small pipe organ into our little storefront, making it seem kind of churchy, if you know what I mean. He gets a good sound out of it, too.
There is a small kitchenette, adequate for staging our weekly after-worship coffee and refreshments—a key hallmark of our fellowship.
And some wonderful things have happened:
The Madison Theater Guild, always hungry for rehearsal space, discovered us. We have hosted their rehearsals for three plays in the last year or so, and they’ll be rehearsing Arsenic and Old Lace at Heritage on weekday evenings early in 2025. We don’t charge any rent or facility use fee. We’re just glad there is something nice we can do for the community.
Some folks who enjoy line dancing use our space on Tuesday afternoons. There is a mah-jong club on Wednesday afternoons. A women’s bridge club may start using our space as well. It’s nice these groups can enjoy a cozy and comfortable space for the things they like to do.
Has all this activity increased our membership? No. But that’s no longer what we’re about.
The church is becoming relevant to our community.
We collect items for a nearby food pantry, and one of our pastors delivers them there on a frequent basis. Some members volunteer there. It’s something we can do for our neighbors.
Pinball machines in the back room.
One of our members enjoys rebuilding or reconditioning old pinball machines. He places them in commercial spaces where they generate a bit of revenue. It’s a side gig for him, outside of his regular job. He was running out of space in his basement to store machines, so we said, “Sean, why don’t you put a couple of machines here?” So he did. We don’t know what we’re going to do with them, but there they are. What will God do with them?
Who knows what comes next? We’re in an experimental frame of mind.
We do not need to hammer our church into a success story. God might plan for our church to die. If so, he hasn’t told us.
Food supply is one way we have been entrusted to feed his sheep. Play rehearsals, line dancing, mah-jong, bridge, and pinballs might also be ways to feed His sheep.
We don’t know and we don’t need to know.
We are calm. We are patient. We are methodical.
We are full of faith, hope, and love.
We’re just doing our thing.
Could that ever add up to the voice of God in somebody’s busy, distracted, vexed, and bewildered life?
You can be born in Amherst, live in Amherst, and die in Amherst. You can go to your grave unheralded.
And then some interfering busybody will publish your poems, and you’ll be famous. Even rich, though only in absentia because by that time, you’ll be . . . elsewhere.
Dear Reader, I am no Emily Dickinson. I find it necessary to promote my own writings while I am still here.
Not that it will make me famous or rich. But I would like somebody to read what I have written.
This is especially true of a little book called Izzy Strikes Gold!, published in July 2024. My second novel. The one nearest my heart.
If you wish to dismiss it, you may call it a middle-grade novel, because that means only pre-teen children should read it.
But here’s a news flash: I wrote it for everybody.
Izzy Mahler is a bright and inquisitive lad, age twelve, the class shrimp in a small Midwestern town. Not everything is going well in his life, but he’s accumulating friends—one by one, almost without being aware of it. And he has private knowledge of a hoard of shiny metal. That could be gold, and gold could help.
The story is set in the Sometimes-But-Not-Always Fabulous Fifties, which lends it a certain charm for those who remember the era, or a sense of wonder for those who have never been there. The kids who inhabit the Fifties are just like kids now—only in a gentler world.
Izzy Strikes Gold! is a charming, sometimes sad, but always honest look at growing up in America, then or now.
It is what we used to call a coming-of-age story.
Did I mention it builds to a Christmastime climax?
This story is too good to be restricted to middle-schoolers. You can read it too.
Izzy Strikes Gold! is a book for anyone who was ever twelve years old, or ever will be. You can read it with your grandchildren.
We here at World Headquarters of the Society for the Belated Appreciation of Artist Peco Yeh pride ourselves on staying abreast of recent developments. By “staying abreast,” we mean, in this case, “only recently made aware.”
I refer thus to a pair of early November emails from attorney-at-law Antonia Lonquist.
In what can only be called a flippant disregard of professional norms, attorney Antonia has not filed suit against the society or me, Your New Favorite Writer.
Rather, she begs to inform us that she is the owner of this painting by our Old Favorite Painter:
Antonia’s canvas.
“I am fascinated,” Antonia wrote on November 6, “by the different styles Peco has used in his paintings that you displayed in your post. I feel it gives my piece a new perspective to see the other styles in his works.”
As you and I know full well, Dear Reader, Mister Yeh—who held forth in Taipei in the 1960s and 1970s at least, and perhaps in other decades as well—flaunted his talent in quite a variety of different styles. His brush-strokes, composition, subject matter, and even, one might say, his basic artistic approach varied widely from one canvas to the next.
It was as if he was not satisfied to paint only one way when there was a whole world of ways to paint.
In an earlier email, Antonia explained how she came into possession of her genuine Peco Yeh painting: “My aunt was cleaning out her house this past weekend and gave me a painting my father had purchased for her some time ago while he was stationed overseas. My father was stationed in Vietnam and Cambodia during the war and would spend time on R&R in Taiwan, Thailand, and other Asian countries. He must have purchased the painting on a trip then.”
I, Dear Reader, happened to be stationed on Taiwan in 1967—possibly even at the same time Antonia’s father visited there on Rest and Recreation Leave.
It was on Chung Shan Pei Lu (Chung Shan North Road) in Taipei that I met Peco Yeh and purchased from him the painting below, which has been seen before on this site.
My Peco.
It’s easy to see that Antonia’s painting and mine have something in common. Both are waterscapes. Peco told me that mine represented a scene on Taipei’s local river, the Tamsui. I don’t know the fancied locale of the watery scene in Antonia’s painting, but it’s not unreasonable to think it is also the Tamsui.
In any case, it hardly matters. Each is really a universal scene. Each could depict any waterway in East Asia. The composition in Antonia’s painting is what I would call eccentric or idiosyncratic. The lighting is contrasty, the brushwork what I would call blocky. It looks like at least part of it was done not with a brush at all but with a palette knife.
Mine, on the other hand, is more traditional or even conventional in composition and brush style. It harkens back more than a thousand years to the great landscape works of the Song dynasty.
I like mine better, but there’s much to be said for Antonia’s canvas, in terms of mental challenge, frenzy, and ferment.
These two paintings exist within a spectrum of other paintings by the same artist, not all of them water scenes. If you have an interest in Peco’s work, you can see those that have come to my attention by searching “Peco Yeh” in the search box at upper right. There are, to date, five posts which have paintings by Peco.
Thanks very much to Antonia Lonquist and other correspondents who have brought forth Peco Yeh canvases for our enjoyment.
Saturday, I will rise at zero-dark-thirty and fly to Washington, D.C., on Badger Honor Flight Mission #57.
Honor flights, in case you don’t know, are group excursions by veterans to view the nation’s monuments and memorials in a context of pomp, circumstance, and profuse gratitude for their military service.
I never imagined I would take part in such a thing.
My father, an infantryman in the Southwest Pacific during the Second World War, would have qualified for an honor flight, but it never occurred to me to sign him up; and then he died.
I was only dimly aware that honor flights were a thing. If I knew of honor flights at all, I had heard of them only as a new thing, a phenomenon of the last twenty years.
You probably know, Dear Reader, Your New Favorite Writer is suspicious of new things.
I’m also suspicious of events which, and people who, make a big deal of military service. During my time in the Air Force, 1965-1969, I was never an enthusiastic Zoomie. I have not been active in veterans’ affairs since then.
Going on an honor flight would have been a bizarre thought for me.
But my friend, the late Jerry Paulsen, went. He was an Army vet. His wife, Mary, also served in the Army, so the two were able to go together on the Badger Honor Flight. It turned out to be a life-changing experience for them.
After the Paulsens returned from their honor flight, Jerry started hounding me to sign up for a flight myself.
But I don’t do what people say just because they nag.
So, why did I sign up? I’ll try to explain.
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“Honor” is a conspicuous word. It is the first word in the phrase “honor flight.” Maybe it’s used in the verbal sense, meaning the event is intended to honor the veterans who take part.
But “honor” also has another sense, a noun sense. It’s an old-fashioned meaning we don’t hear much about these days. Honor is a traditional virtue that was thought to be indispensable to a man’s character.
Honor was applied to women, too, but it accrued on different accounts in the reckoning of the two sexes.
For men, honor was tied to valor and to unswerving loyalty demonstrated in battle. Though honesty and integrity are at its heart, the virtue of honor speaks with a martial accent. War is what commonly delineates male virtue, and our nation has generally provided one war per generation.
Some men get born too late for one war, too early for the next. But most men get the opportunity to fight for their country. Some live in times when they can hardly escape it. It is not only how they acquit themselves in battle, but even how they meet the routine challenges of military life, that brightens or stains their escutcheon of honor.
Honor used to be a powerful motivator. In the Civil War, men did not rush upon one another in thousands, bayonets fixed, and perish in blood and pain because they wanted to do so or because it was fun. Everyone, as Lincoln noted, would have preferred to avoid war. But when it overtook them, most able-bodied men found they could not stay out of it and keep their honor intact.
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates took death by poison rather than forfeit his honor as an Athenian. Socrates the philosopher explained to his friend Crito that Socrates the Athenian must obey the rulings of the city-state. If he was no Athenian, he could be no Socrates. This, although he does not use the word, was a form of honor.
Portrait of Grant around 1843, from a daguerreotype by an unknown photographer. Public Domain.
The young lieutenant Ulysses Grant, convinced the 1846-1848 war with Mexico was an injustice done to a weaker neighbor to serve the political needs of the pro-slavery Democratic party, nevertheless followed orders and went. He was, after all, an officer in the U.S. Army. To withdraw on the eve of war would amount to dishonor.
Winston Churchill—a chesty man, never known to back away from a fight—told the boys at Harrow School in 1941: “Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” (My emphasis.) Honor, Churchill seemed to say, would have you fight, fight, and never give in, exceptwhen honor itself happened to require the opposite.
Churchill in 1941. Photograph by Yousuf Karsh. Public Domain.
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Since Churchill’s time, honor has been steeply discounted.
We no longer covet honor. We no longer talk about honor. We no longer predicate our acts on conceptions of honor.
Still, there is residue. In World War II, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Desert Storm, the U.S. forces were constituted of men who answered to the concept of honor, whether or not it was stated as such.
By the time of the Vietnam involvement, Americans no longer uniformly believed our national honor depended on fighting a war—at least, not this war—or that it was worth the effort and risk of doing so. Thousands of young men fled to Canada or went into hiding in the United States.
I had no wish to fight in a war, or even to serve in uniform, but events gave me little choice. I was soon to be drafted, which meant I would serve in the Army or the Marine Corps.
I chose to enlist in the Air Force. It seemed like a better deal.
At the time, widespread public opposition to the Vietnam War was just starting to get organized.
But six months later, while I was still in training at the Presidio of Monterey, California, rejection of uniformed service had become a real thing. One guy I knew lodged a belated application to be treated as a conscientious objector. Another simply ran off—deserted. Antiwar activists hung around military bases, cultivating friendships with young enlisted men and offering options for clandestine flight.
The opportunity to simply duck out of the war had become real. It could be done. It was an option we all had to address.
I stayed the course. Not because I was brave. Not because I was patriotic. Because, rather, I could identify with Socrates, who chose to remain an Athenian in good standing. I wanted to keep on being an American. I would not have expressed that as honor, but looking back from sixty years on, perhaps it was.
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The young men who fought the Vietnam War sometimes endured taunts and jeers when they came home. I did not experience such things, but many did.
Previously, when Johnny came marching home, he had been received with honor, even with brass bands and parades. But combatants in the Vietnam War were made to feel like inferior life forms. That war and its consequences undermined the caliber and morale of the armed services. President Nixon reached an agreement with the North Vietnamese which amounted to surrender but was termed “peace with honor.” Everybody just wanted to get the hell out.
Then fifteen years passed—a mere eye-blink—and our nation again needed well-trained, capable, and loyal forces, for operations against Iraq. Our leaders resolved that this time around, the troops would be celebrated, would be given dignity and respect. And so, by and large, they were.
There came a general rise in patriotic feeling and a restored regard for military men. These trends were bolstered by our national response to the events of September 11, 2001. All veterans, not just those of Desert Storm, basked in the elevated profile of military service.
In 2004, a National World War II Memorial was built in Washington, D.C. Living veterans of that war were getting older, reaching the end of life; so volunteer organizations sprang up to whisk World War II veterans to Washington so they could see their memorial. This project grew into a nationwide network, which is now active in forty-five states.
As members of the Greatest Generation slipped off to their final rewards, the Honor Flight network began including younger veterans in the trips, Korean- and Vietnam-era vets.
I was dimly aware of all these things. But then Jerry Paulsen came back from his honor flight and began harping at me to sign up. So one day, I idly went to the Badger Honor Flight web page to see how the whole thing worked. What I saw there transformed my attitude.
The honor flight protocol assigns each honored veteran a volunteer “guardian,” a younger person at his elbow throughout the trip. According to the website, “We do this for the safety and accountability of our Veterans. The most important reason is to ensure each Veteran can enjoy their ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to its fullest.” Maybe they want to give needed assistance to aged and infirm veterans yet do not wish to create a distinction between those and the healthier vets.
The key fact to me was that the guardian, though he or she cannot be the veteran’s spouse, can be a family member. I thought of our only child—our daughter, Katie.
Katie is a very bright young woman, now in her late forties, with children of her own and an important job with the State of Wisconsin. Through no fault of her own, she was born after the brouhaha surrounding the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam was all over. She had never lived in a time of war. The Gulf War and the Global War on Terror had come along, of course, when she was an adult—but they had little effect on her personally.
If I went on this trip and took Katie as my guardian—I knew she would do that for her old man—she would receive a precious opportunity to mingle for a day, a meaningful day, with a lot of old men all focused on key events of their young lives. These men might tell stories. They might reveal how things were in those old days.
At the very least, she would experience a certain group reverence and team spirit among a body of men and women who may not all have been in battle, but all of whom have a DD Form 214 in their pockets and know how to use a P-38 government-issue can opener. I thought that when all these guys and gals pay hushed respects at monuments and memorials to their fallen brothers and sisters, Katie might sense that something important was involved.
She might get a glimpse of honor cherished and salvaged, by being among folks grown old in body but still engaged in vexing moments that once occupied their young lives. “. . . made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
For that alone—to give her that opportunity—it will be worth the trip.
Have no fear of missing out, Gentle Reader: I’ll bloviate my impressions of the actual thing next week in this spot, Lord willing.
